Monday’s Forum
Steven L. Taylor
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Monday, September 25, 2023
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86 comments
About Steven L. Taylor
Steven L. Taylor is a Professor of Political Science and a College of Arts and Sciences Dean. His main areas of expertise include parties, elections, and the institutional design of democracies. His most recent book is the co-authored
A Different Democracy: American Government in a 31-Country Perspective. He earned his Ph.D. from the University of Texas and his BA from the University of California, Irvine. He has been blogging since 2003 (originally at the now defunct Poliblog).
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Stephen Blank: ‘Realism’ for Ukraine includes unrealistic expectations:
Kasparov is worried about the Biden administration listening to realists. I’m not. A range of views is good, including skeptics.
My question is the same as Mr. Blank’s: how did the “realist” foreign policy position become, ‘I believe what Putin says about NATO. Let’s cut assistance to try to force Ukraine into a deal. We can trust Russia to honor it this time. This will deter Xi from attacking Taiwan.’
What kind of realist doesn’t know Putin is fatally dishonest and untrustworthy — and as stubbornly dedicated to imperialistic warmongering as Ivan the Terrible and Peter the Great?
Oh right: the same realists who believed Putin’s promises not to attack Kyiv last year while massing troops and weapons at Ukraine’s borders.
Realist. Lol wut? “Realist” must now mean “hopelessly naïve.” There must be some space between these fake realists and hopium-addled Ukraine cheerleaders.
The headline of the day- Hollywood writers reach ‘tentative’ deal with studios, end monthslong strike
@DK: “Realism” is an IR theory (really, a number of related theories). It should not be understood to mean what the colloquial usage of being a realist is.
In the simplest of terms, it assumes that power imbalances cause conflict and that Russia was reacting to a change in the power equilibrium in Europe. The theory cares not one whit about whether Putin is trustworthy or not. Indeed, save in its neoclassical form, doesn’t pay much attention to regime type or to leadership.
@DK:
BTW, not to be carrying water for the realists, but who do you have in mind here?
@DK:
John Mearsheimer would be a current example. You could read his interview with Isaac Chotiner at the New Yorker for an example of Realist thinking.
@Steven L. Taylor:
Given Russia/Putin customary behavior, Realism appears to be an extraordinarily bogus doctrine based on silly assumptions.
ETA: The assertion that the current war in Ukraine is a consequence of NATO expansion is a fine example of Realist thought.
On a total inconsequential topic. Made baking powder biscuits last night. They turned out really good. Maybe the best I’ve ever made.
This morning I discovered I inadvertently doubled the amount of butter in the recipe.
@Steven L. Taylor: Thanks for the definition. Lack of precision in definitions drives so much debate. A dose of American Pragmatism would sometimes be helpful.
As to the current case, seems to me that the EU, and U. S. hegemony, have so far ended war over power imbalances in Europe. Except for Russia. If Putin had the best interests of Russia as a goal, instead of whatever nonsense he is after, he’d have embraced the West, pressed to enter the EU, and eventually even NATO. Instead he’s done this craziness. (To be accurate, he attempted what he thought was a fairly quick, easy project, to overthrow Zelensky and install a puppet, thereby ending the standoff in Donetsk and Luhansk. Didn’t work out that way and now he’s stuck in this morass without an obvious way out.)
US support for Ukraine is the greatest nearly cost-free bargain in IR since Nixon went to China. We’ve spent about 50 billion against a US Defense budget of about 840 billion. So for ~6% of our defense budget and zero loss of life we’ve impoverished and weakened one of our two potential opponents, given the other one something to think about, and greatly strengthened NATO. We spent a trillion* on Iraq and got nothing for it but dead soldiers.
At the same time we’ve cock-blocked China by getting Philippines back on-side and have begun to get Japan and South Korea to behave. The Biden foreign policy has, thus far, been very effective.
*There are several competing estimates of costs.
@Steven L. Taylor: I didn’t want to name names, but I’ll start with Matt Taibbi (who I’m told is a Russia expert, yikes) and Glenn Greenwald.
I could barely type these names without puking.
Really? Ha. Have they considered changing the name of the theory/ideology, or is it a given that such monikers lose any fixed meaning over time, a la “liberal” “conservative”?
@charontwo:
If true, I’m guessing a venn diagram of Realist and Libertarian would be closer to a circle than not.
Thank you Dr. Taylor for the delineation.
I think realism adds value to IR analysis but it has weaknesses, just like other kinds of analysis. It doesn’t analyze whether or not a country’s concerns are actually valid. It doesn’t always separate out the motivations of a dictator vs the motivations of the country they rule. It largely ignores morality and is selective in what history it looks at.
Steve
@Michael Reynolds:
Agreed. But as has been pointed out here numerous times, the problem ins’t the money but the materiel. There’s a number of weapons systems and an amount of ammunition on hand, and making more takes time and money.
So, it’s kind of a race to exhaust Russia before the west uses up its arsenals. Then it’s whatever Ukraine can produce on its own, and what they can buy in the international arms markets.
There’s a saying in military history that amateurs talks tactics, while the pros talk logistics. Increasingly, the pros should talk economics as well.
I call those the Neville Chamberlain plans.
@Scott: HA! Next time substitute bacon grease. I mean, bacon makes everything taste better. Right?
From playgrounds to parade grounds: Russian schools are becoming increasingly militarized (CNN):
It’s giving Hitler Youth. Something something “denatzification” blah blah blah.
Definitely looks like Putin the
DealbreakerDealmaker wants to stop at Donestk, Luhansk, and Crimea. How long till the Kremlin starts pumping Russian troops full of methamphetamine?@Kathy: I think it was Ricks in The Generals who added – and real experts talk personnel policy. An observation that seems relevant to Ukraine. Russia is described as having a top down command structure and has generals selected for political loyalty. Since independence Ukraine’s military have reportedly been partially remolded by NATO training to show more lower level initiative. Their upper ranks seem more “meritocratic” and are supported by Western intelligence and analysis capabilities. Zelensky’s been willing to replace people. So far they seem to be way more motivated than the Russians and to have adapted faster.
Ricks’ real point was directed at the U. S. Army, which he thinks at the top has become to chummy and careerist. Nobody gets fired. Nobody gets reassigned. They rotate too frequently, which means not only that as soon as you learn your job you rotate out, but that it’s easier to just let you finish your rotation than to fire you. He contrasts the policy with Eisenhower, who fired generals regularly. The rules at the time meant reassignment wasn’t a career ender and many of the removed generals made valuable contributions in more suitable roles.
@Scott:
Think I just drooled a little bit.
@DK:
I believe such things were commonplace in the Soviet era.
That’s another reason I often call mad Vlad Stalin Lite.
@Michael Reynolds: And of that 50B, about 24B is weapons and equipment out of existing stocks, which is not new money or appropriations and would have to be replaced anyway.
And as a % of GDP, the US is about midway down the list of countries giving aid to Ukraine.
@DK:
Ah. Well, neither of those is an IR scholar, and I expect neither could provide much of a definition of realism.
As noted, I am not particularly interested in carrying realism’s water, but I did used to teach a graduate seminar on IR theory.
Time precludes a lengthy discussion, but it is not as crazy as it may sound to assume the states, regardless of leadership, behave in predictable ways in a systemic fashion. I could make a pretty cogent analysis from a realist POV as to why Russia invaded that does not take into account Putin’s personality/pathologies.
Back when the Shuttle program began operations, there was much talk about manufacturing things in space, specifically drugs and novel materials. Little ever came off that, if anything did.
Now, it seems companies are getting serious about it.
That’s nice. progress, I suppose. But I wonder how the economics work out. Sure, the Head Xitter, and increasingly others*, has lowered launch costs, but it’s still massively expensive to ship things to orbit.
So maybe you can make better versions of existing drugs in orbit, but the shipping costs involved in manufacturing will render them even more expensive than they are now.
Everyone’s heard of the last mile problem in various fields. Space travel has the opposite problem: the first mile problem. A great deal of the expense in launching a rocket lies with the first stage, which is what accelerates the payload to supersonic speeds and takes it out of the atmosphere. This is why reusing “merely” the first stage has allowed SpaceTwitter to lower launch costs.
Now, if we could set up an infrastructure for making rockets, mining raw materials, and growing food and obtain water and oxygen to sustain crews, in a weaker gravity well, those costs would really come down.
It’s not quite a catch-22 where we could stop launching from Earth if we could set up on the Moon, but we can’t set up on the Moon without launching from Earth. But it’s close. We need to invest many billions, if not trillions, of Euros (what?) largely in launching stuff from Earth in order to realize long term savings by setting up an infrastructure on the Moon.
Then we can send automated probes to mine asteroids, mine the Moon ourselves, capture comets for water and volatiles, and all the neat stuff we see in science fiction novels.
*Not Lex Bezos.
@charontwo:
As would Stephen Walt.
Realism isn’t a doctrine, it is a theory of international relations that in many ways forms the core of IR theory going back over a century. And, really, even theorists who do not subscribe to realism still find themselves in serious dialog with realism.
I would note that often people call themselves “realists” without really knowing what they are talking about (and/or use pseudo-intellectual approaches to cover their own preferences).
@Kathy:
Supposedly the big need is artillery ammunition. And not sophisticated 21st Century rocket assisted, guided shells, but WWII era dumb munitions. I do not understand why we or the Europeans haven’t ramped up production. Explosive and propellant production require great care, but they’re well known processes. We produce them now, the facilities should be easy to duplicate. Is there a shortage of feedstocks? Similarly shells. We make them now. We should be able to run the existing facilities 24/7 and we should be able to make parallel production lines. Again, it’s mid 20th Century technology. And we should be able to easily take a line making 155mm shells and modify it to make 152mm ammunition suitable for all the legacy Russian guns Ukraine has. What’s the bottleneck? Fuses? Again, we made millions of them in 1944. We should be able to do a crash project to multiply production.
The reason I hear is that no one wants to invest the money in a product that may not be needed in a couple years. Governments can easily provide advance orders and guarantees, as we did with COVID vaccines. I have to suspect the bottleneck is lack of will. That, or our sclerotic military procurement system. Can somebody point out a legit bottleneck, or am I to suspect we’re rationing shells?
@gVOR10:
If you find out, please let us know.
@DK: Sounds like something my beloved /s governor DeSantis would like to do.
@gVOR10:
We are ramping up production, there is lead time to build manufacturing facilities.
I wonder whether Menendez just made an unforced error.
He claims the cash found in his house was withdrawn from his account(s) and kept “.. for emergencies and because of the history of my family facing confiscation in Cuba.”
Ok, but doesn’t this statement give prosecutors a legal reason to look into his financial statements for several years? If you find he’s withdrawn far less from his savings than was found at his home, the math works itself out.
@charontwo:
Correct. The theory posits that states react to threats (real and perceived) as it pertains to the general balance of power in the international system, and especially in regional terms.
It is not unreasonable to argue that Russia is reacting to what it perceives as disequilibrium in power in Europe and specifically on its border.
Making such a statement is not intended, when made by an IR scholar, to morally justify Russia’s actions, but is a theoretical explanation for the behavior of the Russian state. It is about a specific theoretical understanding of how the international system operates.
There are additional nuances, depending on whether one is a classical or structural realist as well as whether one thinks states balance threat or power as they seek new equilibria.
This has nothing to do, BTW, with what people like Greenwald or Taibi think/say.
@Steven L. Taylor:
My undergrad, international politics prof referred to that as “continuity and change.”
@Scott: How far are you willing to take this experiment? For science, of course.
@reid: Well, they didn’t rise as well as expected which is a downside. OTOH, if I just add more butter and then sugar, what you have is shortbread. Which would be pretty incompatible with the chicken a la king like concoction I pour over the biscuits.
The Russians are reacting to perceived threats, they’re just paranoid and delusional. They are also pursuing a revanchist and nostalgic approach, humiliated by the dissolution of the USSR and embracing absurd notions of a Russian empire reborn. Religion is involved as well, also good old fashioned nationalism and the usual cultural whines about western corruption. As usual, there is no single bullet theory that explains everything.
Russia’s population is ~144 million and dropping. In about seven years the population of Mexico will be greater, and so will their GDP. Russians are not psychologically prepared to be Mexico. Russia has a 2600 mile border with China, a 1600 mile border with NATO and 1400 miles of Ukraine border. Russia’s population and GDP are flatly insufficient to actually defend their country using conventional weapons. If China decided to start carving off bits and pieces the Russians would have exactly two options: nuclear war or surrender.
The logical thing for Russia to do would be to become a normal country, make peace with Europe, Ukraine and Turkey. They would be more secure and they could stop trying to keep up with the US. They could focus their military on the Chinese border. But they won’t do that. They’ll commit slow suicide, with their population growing older and smaller, their economy becoming ever poorer and their military weaker. Then the fractures will deepen and there is a serious possibility that Russia itself will break apart.
@Scott: Omit the sugar and include some chicken-compatible herbs to make a savory shortbread, maybe? Sounds tasty to me. I guess it would depend on whether the texture of the shortbread is a pleasing contrast to the chicken concoction.
@Steven L. Taylor:
Do I remember correctly that the name was coined as a reaction against Institutionalist or Liberal/Idealist theories? (And is it identical with realpolitik?)
It’s been too long since I did Seminar XXI…
@Steven L. Taylor:
And, explicitly, that they are NOT significantly driven by ideologies, personalities, or institutions? Do I have that right?
@Bill Jempty:
Details have yet to be released, but the union seems happy with the deal in principle.
Good for them.
Now, what about the actors? Even if writers get back to work soon, productions can’t resume until that other strike is settled.
@Michael Reynolds:
Understate that I think that Russia’s actions are morally indefensible and, moreover, that their perception of threat is overblown.
I will that that, however, that it is neither unreasonable nor irrational for Russia to perceive expansion of NATO or the EU as a real threat. WWI, WWII, and the Cold War, at a minimum, give them some reasons.
This ranges into constructivist arguments about their behavior (although one could shape them into a realist argument as well).
And that’s liberal IR theory talking.
You all are making me miss my seminar.
@DrDaveT: Most realists look only at system level considerations.
@Steven L. Taylor: Especially neorealists also known as structural realists (their intellectual father was Kenneth Waltz).
@DrDaveT:
Basically, yes. Classical realism as espoused by Hans Morgenthau (which is the flavor most associated with realpolitik) was an intellectual reaction to Wilsonian (e.g., League of Nations) idealism (which was an early form of IR liberalism).
@Steven L. Taylor:
I honestly fail to see how. It was Germany that invaded the Russian empire in 1914, and then Japan and Germany in WWII. During the Cold War, no one invaded the USSR.
NATO did get involved in the Balkans in the 90s, which has bothered the Russians no end for various reasons. Past that, NATO has acted in a strictly defensive capacity since then, including Afghanistan. When Bush the younger went into Iraq, NATO did not get involved, most notably not France and Germany.
Neither NATO nor the EU took part in the operation by Britain, Israel, and France to secure the Suez channel in the 50s. They didn’t send troops to the Falklands, either, when Argentina attacked British territory.
I’d be as afraid of being invaded by the Vatican as I would of NATO, where I at home minding my business. But then, my business does not involve ethnic cleansing.
If Germany wants to invade Poland and then Russia again, she’ll have to do it without NATO and without nukes.
IMO, Russia, be it as an empire, as the USSR, or as whatever it is now, simply does not care to have borders with countries it cannot dominate or intimidate, even when they have no intention to dominate or intimidate any of them. Put stronger countries on its borders, or countries part of a strong alliance with a nuclear umbrella, and they think it’s no different from having China on their western border.
@Kathy:
It isn’t hard: a massively powerful alliance expands its geo-strategic advantage by allying with a massively large country that borders your country. They have large militaries (including advanced weaponry and nukes) and massive economies.
The point of my examples is not specific countries being a threat (although Germany is a very important member of both the EU and NATO and has even demonstrated a willingness of late to expand its military capabilities). The point is simply that the experience of being invaded (WWI and WWII, not to mention the Napoleonic wars) are enough to fuel Russia’s paranoia.
If people in the US can talk themselves into being afraid of migrants, how much more do you think Russians fear NATO and EU expansion to their borders?
See also: the US response to Soviet missiles in Cuba in 1962.
The main problem with realism IMU-HO, is that it has an (unrealistic) preference for creating formalised systems of state interaction that are abstracted from the messy realities of historical contingency, culture/sociology, alliance politics etc.
It’s particularly annoying in view of the reality that much of European history since 1500 is full of repeated examples of “lesser” states turning round on “greater Powers and saying : “No. Won’t.”
And coming out on top in the end.
See the current absence of Ottoman rule in the Balkans; etc etc etc.
The particularly amusing (or potentially horrifying, depending on your taste and mood) element is that aggressive realism demands that the US calculate a means of sustaining security by global hegemony.
And thus come to similar conclusions as the Campists about the necessary thrust of US policy from diametrically opposite starting points.
“A lovely theory, cruelly murdered by an ugly fact.”
My blood comes to a boil too often with health care providers and doctors.
Today’s problem- I have a procedure to be done for next week. I asked that it be done on Wednesday October 4th. No problem Julie says.
Over the weekend I noticed the info sheet I was given says October 3rd. Tuesday isn’t a good day for my wife. I call the doctor’s office 3 times today. 1st call- I left a voice mail message for Julie. 2nd call- I get voice mail but don’t leave a 2nd message. 3rd call- I get put on hold for 5 minutes before the receptionist let me get a word in edge wise. When she does get to my call and I ask for Julie, I get told Julie is off today. Why wasn’t I told that the first time I called? Incompetent doctor’s office staff.
Last time I went to the cardiologist, his nurse stares at me when I tell her how much of a medication I am taking. It was like I was talking Martian to her and I loathe having to say anything more than twice. So I raised my voice my 3rd time as I repeated multiple times to her how much I was taking. The moron complains I am yelling at her, which I wasn’t. I said at least two times all my other medication is the same but she continues to ask me my medication. I told her she must be deaf. Nurse walks out and complains to the doctor about me.
Then there are the doctor and testing center who try to squeeze me for more than the alloted co-pay. With the latter which I been to multiple times and it is always $50 they ask for $160. Twice since last November.
Let’s get to the Mattison podiatry practice. The first time I went to them they asked me for $97. For whatever reason I gave them 60. I get the statement from Florida Blue its $50. I got mad with the doctor’s office and he called me to apologize. A google search by me finds they asking for more money than is owed hasn’t just been done to me.
Guess what? Another office visit almost a year to the date after the first visit, the office asks me again for more than $50. I accused them of being crooks. The same doctor* who earlier apologized kicked me out of the office.
I have been having overcharging incidents going back as far as 2002 when my wife was pregnant and needed an ultrasound done. They asking for $110 when all we owed was $15. I paid the $110 and I learned it was only 15 when I got the statement. I didn’t know better back then. In that case I had to raise hell to get my credit card refunded. Thanks to a recent incident of these attempts at overcharges, I got a copy of what it says at Florida Blue’s web portal. It clearly says $50**. So why do providers down here put the squeeze on me? I’m sure they do it to others and I’m not inclined to believe it is not just office staff that don’t know what they are doing.
*- The podiatry practice is a husband and wife plus a son. I’ve dealt with the father, who was the one who kicked me out, and the son. The wife is supposed to be a d00zy. I had been referred to the office by my former podiatrist as he retired. Dr. Feierman warned me I wouldn’t like her.
**Co-pay went from 15 to 50 around 2014.
@JohnSF: I am not going to disagree. I think that Russian self-perception and its concept of the West is a huge part of the problem. I think that constructivist logic, therefore, is more compelling.
But I don’t think that the basic realist argument is nonsensical, just incomplete.
And, again (speaking to the broader conversation, even outside of this comment thread) I think that a lot of people conflate the why of Russia’s behavior with a moral assessment of the action (as well as preferred outcomes).
@Steven L. Taylor:
I would add to that realists believe Putin can be trusted to honor a deal if it is in his best interests to do so. There is not a great body of evidence supporting the assertion that Putin has gone stark raving mad.
@Kathy:
I’m surprised we haven’t seen a propaganda campaign sponsored by our arms manufacturers about how helping Ukraine is good, to shore up American support and ensure more orders.
If it’s there, it’s not really visible compared to the “why are we spending money in Ukraine when we have veterans on the streets” nonsense and the like that is clearly coming from Russia.
Where is our Military Industrial Complex when we need it?
Also, if our supplies are getting used up this quickly by one regional conflict, we might need a larger stockpile.
@gVOR10: A few things:
– You would be surprised how long it takes to construct a facility when you are not in emergency (aka “We are being attacked at Pearl Harbor!”) mode.
– I would assume that the shell manufacturers are running 24/7 at this point. They still can’t keep up with existing capacity.
– I’ve been in a lot of plants and anything high volume is astoundingly optimized for the product. I wouldn’t at all be surprised that shaving a few millimeters off and trying to run it through existing equipment wouldn’t work at all, and modifying that equipment to work for the desired size would take quite a bit longer than you might imagine. And then it would no longer work for the size our own military needs.
– I don’t know how far ahead the government/military can guarantee payment. I know our contracts are year by year, and after negotiating them we have to wait to find out how much gets funded.
– I don’t know from canon shells, but I can tell you about N95 masks. A lot of companies invested a lot of money in getting into the business, but the bigs just added as much capacity as through could through process and minor mods to their existing infrastructure. The upstarts are almost all out of that business or out of business completely, having lost their shirts. The bigs are all down to minimal shifts and way too much inventory on hand.
Absent an attack on the homeland, new factories are built based on 15-30 year projects. No one knows if Ukraine war will be settled in 6 mos, a year, two years or drag on longer. But not likely 15-30 years.
@dazedandconfused: Realists believe that the Russian state will behave rationally in terms of their own self-interest, yes. I would note that, on balance, most IR theories assume some semblance of a rational actor model.
But, being a rational actor does not mean one does make mistakes or that one cannot do a poor job of assessing one’s own self-interest.
FWIW, and I think that Putin is still a rational actor. I also think he gravely miscalculated at the onset of this war and has no good options, hence the lack of clarity as a way to exit the conflict.
@Steven L. Taylor: Just curious: does anyone use Realist IR or any other “ist” or “ism” to make predictions ahead of time and then see how the predictions perform in the instance? That kind of research would be interesting even to us lay people.
@Steven L. Taylor:
I hate people. Somewhere, someone decided that they would create a doctrine, and declare it to be “realism” and he wasn’t laughed out of the room. Instead, he got the name that makes it sound like he’s the only reasonable party and everyone else is talking about fantasy land.
When he presented his doctrine, people should have grabbed their chairs, canes, small children or whatever other makeshift bludgeons were handy, and beaten him to death.
It’s like someone saying “I’m an honest guy” or “I’m just trying to be fair” or “I don’t murder prostitutes and hide their bodies in the walls of my cellar” — it should make the skin crawl and make everyone instinctively hostile.
@Gustopher:
Man oh man, am I glad that we don’t. Arms manufacturers ginning up jingoism and hysteria to promote sales of their products? Imagine if the NRA made nuclear weapons!!!
@Steven L. Taylor:
“…I don’t think that the basic realist argument is nonsensical, just incomplete.”
I’d argue so incomplete as to verge on being nonsense.
It’s bit like abstracting some points of individual animal anatomic biology and expecting to develop a workable concept of ecology on that basis alone. You might get it done, but it’s a big ask.
It has some partial points, about the Hobbesian nature of international relation generally. But misses out so much else, that it’s again like trying to derive the operations of modern Western polities purely from Hobbes. Or purely from Marx, for that matter.
Even in terms of the Russian policies towards Ukraine, simplistic “realism” not only does not work very well but is actively misleading.
The focus on machtpolitik jumps straight to “NATO fear” as the prime driver of Putin’s Ukraine policy.
It is almost certainly not.
It seems far more linked to the economic and legal/political orientation and possible developments of Ukraine as a polity due to association with the EU, and thus a massive loss to the Putin model of a state-elite centered system of what the Russian ruling class views as the “historically proper” governance of a natural part of the “Russian world”.
@Steven L. Taylor:
I’ll grant capability counts for a lot. When bordering an alliance with great military capability, it makes sense to posses the capability to deter it or defeat it.
On the other hand, what military capability does Mexico have? I doubt we could take Belize*. If america for some reason wanted another bite of northern Mexico, we’d be as successful in stopping it as we were the last time. Hell, our best strategy would be to flood the are with poor people who want to live or work in the US.
So, if the very powerful neighbor isn’t interested in invading you, and has no record of aggressive intent to its other neighbors, doesn’t it make more sense to join them rather than prepare to fight them?
At that, the EU offers far better terms than regional trade pacts like NAFTA. It’s no wonder just about all the former Warsaw Pact nations joined or want in.
Except Russia.
*Mexico’s overall military prowess, or lack thereof, makes me laugh so hard when I consider the infamous Zimmermann Telegram.
And I mean besides the fact Mexico was embroiled in a civil war at the time.
@JohnSF: I would give realism a bit more credit than you are (and I would note that even your last paragraph can be cast as a realist interpretation without much tweaking). I also think that reducing the realist argument down to “NATO fear” is overly simplistic.
But, as noted, I am just trying to explain the basic notion, not trying to be its defender.
You are right to cite Hobbes, and I also agree that Hobbes, as interesting as he may be, gets an awful lot wrong, empirically.
@Steven L. Taylor:
If this was a game of Risk and I was playing Russia, I’d want peace with NATO.
The Russians know perfectly well that NATO has no designs on Russian territory – we don’t keep our ambitions secret. Sure, Napoleon, Wehrmachts 1 and 2, but the economics have changed dramatically since 1941. No one is looking for lebensraum, absolutely no one is thinking of trying to occupy Russia. There’s simply no profit in it. The cost of taking and occupying Russian territory would be astronomical and for no off-setting gain. Their natural gas is pretty much all on the far side of the Urals, who the hell would go for that?
If they need to fear anyone on their western front (south more than west actually) it’s Turkey. Turkey is making a play for major power status, competing with the KSA for influence in the Muslim world. Azerbaijan and the ‘Stans backed by the Turks could be an issue, but NATO won’t back that play. Russia just does not have the strength to defend their own borders, they need peace treaties with NATO which might at least act as a rein on Turkey.
They could have negotiated a free and neutral Ukraine, and have a peaceful border with NATO – Germany doesn’t want to be re-arming, they want to be burning Russian natural gas and making BMWs. Russia is just too weak to accommodate Putin’s grandiosity. I keep hoping that someone in the intelligence services or military will wake up to the fact that Putin is making Russia weaker and more vulnerable. Even if we grant their paranoid rationale, they are accomplishing the exact opposite of Putin’s goals.
@Steven L. Taylor:
I’s confident that when realists encounter arguments that “Putin can never be trusted!” they reply with “So how does this end?”
I would count Pickering and the late Holbrook as realists. Effective diplomats have to embrace the doctrine to some degree. They can not abandon themselves to Reductio ad Hitlerum and still conduct a rational conversation with their adversary.
@dazedandconfused:
Indeed.
@Michael Reynolds: One thing is for certain, international politics would be a lot easier if people would behave the way we want them to!
(And understand, I largely agree with you, but I also don’t find various other explanations for Russian behavior to be off the wall–even if it is behavior that I see as mistaken).
@Kathy:
That is basic realist talk right there.
Meanwhile in Mali, Wagner’s unfortunate sequence of events regarding aircraft continues.
Latest reports indicate most of the c.140 passengers on the Russian Il-76 were Wagner mercs; and a sizable cargo of their gear.
Meanwhile the Islamist/Taureg alliance is besieging Timbuku.
And France has told Niger that they are leaving them to it, and the junta can kiss their froggy behinds.
If the collapse of the Sahelian state control of areas away from their capital-cores continues, the probability of an ECOWAS force deploying on the frontiers grows.
@dazedandconfused:
Yes, but the real problem is getting Putin to make a deal, and then keep a deal if he changes his calculus about where his best interests lie.
At present, the Russian government seems to believe that there is no go reason not to persist in war, both in terms of Russian internal politics being stable (for now), and in hopes for a collapse of Western support = Trump to the rescue!
@Steven L. Taylor:
Agreed.
It seems to me that the most glaring failures of Realism as a predictive theory in recent times are Brexit and US foreign policy under Trump.
@Gustopher:
The defense primes are very conservative, and the defense industrial base is precisely sized to the steady state demand. Their behavior makes a lot more sense if you think of them as being regulated public utilities, more like the cable company or the power company than like the entrepreneurial world. Neither is going to race to build a lot of infrastructure for a short-term need.
Collapsed down to a cartel of 4 or 5 monopoly providers and a monopsony buyer.
Re. shell production: this was a massive problem for the Allies in WW1 from end 1914 through 1915. It was only resolved in the UK by creating a Cabinet-level Ministry of Munitions under David Lloyd-George that bypassed the War Office, and had sweeping powers of direction over industry and manpower, and effectively unlimited budgets.
Essentially the model for British “war socialism” as applied from the outset in WW2.
It also forced the Liberals to take the Conservatives into coalition, and set Lloyd-George on the path to deposing Asquith in alliance with the Tories, and becoming Prime Minister in 1916.
@Steven L. Taylor:
You wouldn’t necessarily need to teach constitutional law to grasp the Constitution’s basics. Taibbi is not an American academic, but he did study at Leningrad Polytechnic and launch his career as a journalist and public intellectual in Russia, where he lived and worked for 6+years. This is the basis for his alleged expertise in Russian affairs.
Unfortunately both Taibbi and Greenwald, among others, have been effective disseminators of the so-called realist position, described by Dr. Stephen Blank, senior fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Instituteas, in the article from my original comment as thus:
Blank goes on to argue against what he describes as the realist position by explaining that Putin will not negotiate in good faith, that Putin’s aims are genocide not territory, that Ukraine’s goals are achievable, that the US economy can withstand Ukrainian assistance, and that thwarting Russia is key to nuclear deterrence, deterrence of China, and global stability.
Blank concludes:
I’m naturally skeptical of appeals to credentials, but Dr. Blank knows what realists in IR are arguing, given that he is former professor of Russian national security studies and national security affairs at the Strategic Studies Institute of the U.S. Army War College and a former MacArthur fellow at the U.S. Army War College.
Although, again, one should not need a CV that dense to reach Blank’s position — critical thinking skills and a strong sense of human behavior will suffice.
@Steven L. Taylor:
Even that can be taken too far.
I’ve been watching YouTube videos related to spaceflight recently. I came across a deepish dive into the Soviet attempt at a shuttle, the Buran orbiter. the rationale for developing it, was that the US was developing the Shuttle, and the Soviets thought it was for military purposes.
Now, prior to the Shuttle, crewed launches were few and for very specific purposes, and no one had launched more than 3 people at one time. The Shuttle promised weekly launches, and could carry up to 7 people, plus a huge volume/mass of cargo. The Soviets could not know ahead of time the system would be too complicated, too labor intensive, and too expensive to ever come even close to that kind of frequency.
So if the Americans were developing a military reusable heavy launch system, the Soviets would as well.
The Shuttle was used in military missions, about which there is little information. But by far most launches were either commercial and science, including visits to the late Mir and the soon-to-be-late ISS. And the idea behind its development was to lower launch costs. As with launch frequency, NASA came nowhere near close.
So, was this realism or Russian/Soviet paranoia?
BTW, someday I need to expound on the Buran/Energia system. For one thing,it was not intended to lower launch costs as far as I can tell.
@Bill Jempty: Wow! I’d move out of Florida if I were you. I’ve not had any of the problems you mention with my healthcare providers. My only problem is that while I live in a town with a large regional hospital with a full-service medical clinic (all but one or two specialties like neurology), my supplemental insurance provider only permits me to use specialists in Portland, 50+ miles away even though both the hospital and MC are in the PPO.
Fortunately, Portland makes a nice day trip, so it’s not too burdensome.
@Steven L. Taylor:
Putin is an extreme example of a common despot problem – bad information.
The man does not use the internet and talks to a very limited number of people, people who have learned it best to tell Putin what he wants to hear. His military commanders feed him rosy portrayals of the military situation. This affects how “rational” his decisions are.
Also, Putin’s perceived self interest and that of Russia may not fully match.
ETA:
And you think Putin wants to end the conflict because ???
On another topic, the anti-woke trollosphere is ecstatic that Bob Iger is signaling a walk-back from ‘wokeness.’
I’m disappointed but not surprised. Righteous goals are not enough, you need to get it right, and Amazon with Rings of Power and Disney with Star Wars, Indiana Jones and Marvel, did it wrong.
Disney has been trying to buy its way to financially safe creativity. Bought Fox, bought Marvel, bought Star Wars and Indy, then tried to flood the market with re-imaginings of IP that was built with a male audience uppermost in their minds, and in just about every case, a story that leaned heavily on literal, physical strength. For the record, the strongest 110 pound woman in the world cannot take on a 220 pound man in a fist fight, for the same reason that a Ford Fiesta cannot take on a Lincoln Navigator in a head-on: physics.
Also given the fact that 90% plus of violence in this world is committed by men and not women, suggests to me that there may be differences between how a 110 pound woman and a 220 pound man relate to the world. There was never a good reason to assume that women would like violence as much as men, for the same reason that gazelles do not enjoy the hunt as much as leopards do.
Rather than go to the trouble and risk of creating new movies and shows where female leads would be in at the foundational level, they did the lazy thing. Barbie made 1.4 billion despite being ‘woke’ and overtly feminist because it was purpose-built for that and well-executed. Virtue does not sell tickets or streaming subs, great movies and shows sell tickets. Now Iger is Napoleon retreating from Moscow, and because he screwed the pooch so badly, the whole Hollywood DEI effort is in jeopardy. The lesson Hollywood will take from this is that DEI is financial ruin, and that is the wrong lesson. The lesson is: you still have to make good, original, fun stuff and within that you can have all the DEI you want. Quality first, diversity second because that is the only way DEI succeeds. It’s not enough to be right, you also have to be smart.
@Mikey:
Without rice flour and fruit sugar it wouldn’t be real shortbread anyway.
@charontwo: @MarkedMan:
That’s pretty much my point. I’ve seen, for instance, a line for machining Big Three cylinder heads put together in less than a year.
I understand what you’re saying, this stuff takes time. But in what you’re saying I’m also hearing a certain amount of, as I said, “… lack of will. That, or our sclerotic military procurement system.” It really doesn’t seem like this has the urgency one might hope for. There doesn’t seem to be a lot of information readily available, but here’s an item about spending a ton of money to multiply capacity. By 2028, starting March this year. Seems to me well short of “Pearl Harbor” urgency.
So, it seems Thrawn as depicted in the latest ep of Ahsoka looks like the Head Xitt. At least according to users on Xitter: “They made Thrawn look like Elon Musk eating too many blueberries at the Wonka factory,”
Past that, which is funny, the piece complaints Thrawn wasn’t scary at all.
It’s a bit hard to pin down Thrawn, seeing as there are three or 3.5 versions of the character:
Thrawn 1.0 in the New Star Wars Trilogy by Timothy Zahn.
Thrawn 1.1 in Zahn’s followup novels, Hand of Thrawn (2 books) and Final Flight (1 book)
Thrawn 2.0 as depicted in Rebels.
Thrawn 3.0 in Zahn’s new Thrawn trilogy, made after both the Lucas prequels and the TV show Rebels
Anyway, the one commonality, besides all being a kind of art Jedi, is that Thrawn is ruthless and amoral in pursuit of whatever goal he sets himself, and he’s brilliant at it. This makes him very dangerous, but not necessarily scary.
I won’t spoil what he did in Ahsoka, but I’ll say it was 100% Thrawn as described in the paragraph above.
@JohnSF: It’s hard to know for sure. IMO it is very likely they are simply seeking to not be completely humiliated lest that cause a lot of other nations in the RU to view them as weak, and also break away. Not much different from Nixon’s “peace with honor” policy in Vietnam.
The comments by Leo Tolstoy’s grand son reflect that kind of thinking, anyway, and he is high enough to know. Either they get to hang on to some territory or they will seek to have Ukraine pay so high a price for it there will be none thinking “That’s what we should do!”
@Michael Reynolds: The problem with Marvel and Star Wars is not DEI or wokeness, the problem is that those brands are tired and oversaturated. Iger’s comments are being misread and overblown, as is the idea that Hollywood will turn against its diversity efforts.
Twitter has its own reality, but Hollywood money men operate in the reality of basic economics (and prestige bragging rights). They know the rising generation of Americans is more progressive and diverse than ever. The chances media conglomerates operationally-based in Los Angeles, New York, and Atlanta let that growth market go untapped are somewhere between 0 and less than zero.
Even “The Little Mermaid” turned a profit despite the best efforts of the anti-woke, sitting at $600 billion in global box office and merchandising well, while becoming the second-biggest streaming debut ever on Disney+.
Reactionaries and regressives have been complaining about Hollywood liberalism and decadence since the 1920s. That hasn’t stopped the show, and it’s not going to.
The other Man From U.N.C.L.E. has died.
David McCallum 90
RIP
(cnn)
@Michael Reynolds:
I think your frame of reference is clouded. I know I’m all superwoman testosterone bones and stuff, but my partner could beat me to death with very little effort. I’m 6ft about 220. She’s a foot smaller than me and maybe 150. She can and has held me completely down. At first it was funny (and hot). Now it’s hysterical (and hot). I could not for the life of me move her. The only reason she keeps me around is I’m adorable and can get things off high shelves.
The difference is she works out every day and I’ve sat on my ass since my surgeries. Maybe on average a 220 pound man is going to win, but it’s not an absolute.
As for Star Wars, the mistake seems to have been letting JJ Fartstink anywhere near it. The whole sequel trilogy screwed up so much. It would have been better to let Filoni do whatever he’s doing. His stuff has been good at a minimum. Solo was fine. Rogue One was phenomenal. The bad in the IP is either Abrams or some of Lucas’ BS.
@Kathy:
I thought Thrawn was great. The only thing I didn’t like was how he was lit. I couldn’t tell if he had a little beard, a Thanos butt-chin, or just a wrinkly chin. I always thought that Thrawn was scary because he was smart and methodical. A very orderly kind of evil. Which makes me deeply uncomfortable as a chaos person.
Actor David McCallum has passed away at age 90.
He was well known for NCIS and The Man from Uncle but I rarely have watched the first show and never the second. I remember McCallum mostly for his parts in The Great Escape, A Night to Remember, The Greatest Story Ever Told, Billy Budd, and for some of his many guest appearances on television. RIP.
@Beth:
Watching this latest series, I had the notion that perhaps the sequels should have involved Ahsoka rather than Rey as a central character. But she’s older than Luke, Han, and Leia, and would be dead or infirm by that time…
IMO, the flaw was not having a story outline from the start. JJ did one thing, then Johnson did something different, then JJ did essentially the same thing again.
I tend not to be critical of movies I enjoy, but then upon further viewing my inner critic does wake up. So I now sum up the sequels as “Well, that was repetitive and pointless, but with some snappy dialogue.” And Rey still rocks.
Trivia from WikiP:
@gVOR10: The amount of time argument is only part of it. Probably more significant is the fact that there is no economic incentive to build something since, a) right now they are selling everything they can make and are probably striving mightily to squeeze out every unit of production, b) If they invest millions in capitol and a year (Permitting, safety, EPA, all waived?) or more and finally ramp up production to start selling, and then there is a cease fire, they have a few months more of production after that, and then they have an idled plant, laid off workers and cleanup issues, along with a good chunk of their capital depreciating month by month.
I’m nobody’s expert on this, but still it seems to me that if you want to essentially override normal business concerns you need to declare a war or at least a national emergency and essentially (or actually!) seize the means of production.
@Kathy:
I think you’re right about not having an outline. Or in this case, I suspect it was, “let’s hire JJ to be a big splash! He’ll figure it out!” and then he promptly ignored everything that Star Wars had been working on and came up with a lot of crap. I like Rey well enough. I think she’ll grow on me more as time passes. When I was a kid I thought Han and Lando were so cool. Now I realize they were assholes and the real hero is Leia. I liked the characters in the Sequels, but the plots were meh. And Palpatine being the villian, meh. I am still super pissed that Poe and Finn didn’t get together, that would have been beautiful.
@Michael Reynolds:
As I’m sitting here annoyed with your drive by boomerism, I’m starting to wonder if you’ve to the wrong hollywood obsession to be worried about. Forget “Woke”, why do so many franchises go with/lionize child soldiers? Star Wars is pretty bad with it. The whole Halo franchise is build on kidnapped tortured child soldiers. It’s wild.
The Man From U.N.C.L.E. TV series premiered in the fall of 1964 when I was a junior in High School. I remember it being a big hit with my classmates. I knew that U.N.C.L.E. was a fictitious organization and I couldn’t believe that many people thought it was real.
From WikiP:
It takes very little Googling to figure out why we are struggling to ramp up shell production as fast as some people here think we should. Somewhat briefly:
1) There is no shortage of raw materials for basic shells, but there is a massive delay in production equipment. We no longer have the workforce or work processes of WWII (even if we could train people to use WWII style methods, the furnaces today are totally different and expect a robotic arm). The lead times for the industrial robotics needed to handle the production are long, involving multiple countries, supply chains, and bureaucracies.
2) We (foolishly) consolidated the defense industry in the 90’s. Went from 45-50 major suppliers to 5, many of which don’t even compete with each other. They each have a large slice of the defense budget pie and are effectively single source for far too many products. The utterly predictable dearth of innovation has happened.
3) Also, all these companies use some variant of lean or just-in-time manufacturing, which is great for the business and consumer products (well, it has at least some positives), but makes surging production almost impossible when you need it for urgent military (or pandemic) purposes. It took months to surge production of basic surgical masks (not even N95), for crying out loud, which require much less complex, dangerous, and expensive manufacturing processes than artillery shells.
4) Congress, as usual, is also a roadblock. It’s hard to get any company to build capability when you won’t hand out multi-year contracts for things like ammo and piss around with the budget all the time (this year is the first time in forever we have signed multi-year deals ensuring future buys, assuming of course the coming shutdown doesn’t ruin things).
5) Nimby-ism is alive and well. Besides people not wanting large amounts of explosives in their neighborhood, the process isn’t the environmentally cleanest around.
6) Most people don’t understand the scale of the surge required. We don’t need to double or triple production. We’re (the West, in general) trying to move from 75-80k shells per month (about 4 average days in Ukraine) to closer to a million shells per month. All companies and nations are trying to get the same sort of backlogged equipment needed, which only a couple companies make, and they need sophisticated computer chips which are backlogged for a huge number of reasons (including needing the same sorts of chips for precision munitions, also being desperately ramped up), etc etc etc.
Modern capitalism works great with a steady state situation or gentle/predicable curves. It’s absolute shit at dealing with the unexpected.
In case anyone hasn’t read it, yet.
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2023/11/general-mark-milley-trump-coup/675375/?utm_source=copy-link&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=share
@Beth:
It’s not my Hollywood obsession, Beth, it’s the business’s obsession. Hollywood does not produce shows for fun, they do it for money. Disney is in serious financial trouble. They have a huge payment coming up for Hulu, their streaming is burning money, and their main product lines: SW, Marvel, Pixar and Disney Animation are all failing simultaneously. You don’t have to believe me, just watch DEI veeps and execs be thrown out the windows of Sleeping Beauty’s castle.
By the way, I very much doubt that Rey is coming back to Star Wars. Kathleen Kennedy is being effectively locked out of her office as Disney waits for her contract to expire. They want her gone so bad they’re initiating what amounts to moral/criminal investigations to find a ‘for cause.’
This does not mean we’ll suddenly see nothing but White males in every role, I think on-screen diversity will still be there, I think that’s in the DNA now. It certainly is in mine, and my agent’s getting ready to shop my first ever feature script. And if either Gone or Front Lines or Animorphs* ever make it to screen, and they don’t fuck it up, you can see DEI done right. But the era of, ‘the first female Black whatever!” is over.
Disney (and others) could have been done so much better, they could have avoided the backlash and still achieved their goals and made it stick. They were lazy and they fucked up and now Iger, the very symbol of ‘liberal Hollywood,’ has to mumble a surrender.
*Speaking of child soldiers. I have not noticed a rise in that trope but it may well be our fault – there are a lot of Animorphs fans in Hollywood.